1. No power can change what Allah decrees,
So seek patience, or resignation if grief seizes you.

2. Submit to destiny, accept what
The Almighty has ordained, be it hateful or desirable.

3. When fate assails a man of dignity,
It bends his stiff neck, so he walks humbly.

4. But if he summons up his strength of purpose,
Sorrow itself will be overcome.

5. Burn anguish with anguish, and so extinguish
The embers that smolder in the bosom’s depths.

6. Whoever contends with fate will never lack
Turmoil to afflict him lifelong.

7. There is no refuge from destiny’s caprice,
Its hands will toss and batter ceaselessly,

8. No throngs whose ties of love it will not sever,
Leaving the rope of union severed.

9. Yet nothing has confounded us like the loss
Of one whose death has robbed us of the light

10. Of guidance and the glory of all knowledge—
Abu Ja’far, who has taken knowledge with him.

11. Death did not destroy a man, rather
It destroyed a guiding beacon raised for the faith.

12. Fate poured him into the earth like a piercing star
Against the enemies of truth.

13. Through him the times were purified,
Now they are troubled and muddied.

14. Never will his days return, days which set up
Beacons of knowledge and gates of piety.

15. Time will never reproduce his like, though
The pilgrims circle the house of stone forever.

16. He kept faith in injustice, doused the flames of discord,
His reason stayed calm in distress, not to be disturbed.

17. If he spoke, honesty guided his words; if he preferred
Silence, he sought to school himself.

18. He looked to his heart and the reverent fear that filled both,
Waking thought through promise and threat.

19. His preaching would clear the rust from hearts
As the light of dawn dispels the dark.

20. Outwardly and inwardly he was equally balanced,
Never tilting to excess or falling short.

21. No eulogist feared to insult him with inadequacy,
No critic feared to overpraise.

22. Every land yearned to be his final resting place,
To scent its earth with his blessed body.

23. Your life was a light to this world and its people,
With your loss, their light was eclipsed.

24. If the earth knew whom it covers,
Its realms would bow down before you in reverence.

25. You corrected crookedness and deviation,
Counseled sincerely, guided and educated benevolently.

26. You embodied purified morals,
Refined and freed from the dross of ignorance.

27. If destiny sought you insistently,
Weakness could not deter you from the desired.

28. For death has a fated drink, bitter yet compulsory,
However much it is hated.

29. They mourn you, and their pillars are shaken,
Knowledge itself weeps and laments for you.

30. Among the wonders of these times
Is that earth’s darkness shrouds you in its folds

31. When you illuminated plain and hillside.